It is known to utilize telephone call centers to facilitate the receipt, response and routing of incoming telephone calls relating to customer service, retention, and sales. A customer is in contact with a customer service representative (“CSR”) or CSR agent who is responsible for answering the customer's inquiries and directing the customer to the appropriate individual, department, information source, or service as required to satisfy the customer's needs. It is well known to monitor calls between a customer and agent. Accordingly call centers typically employ individuals responsible for listening to the conversation between the customer and the agent. While monitoring such calls may occur in real time, it is often more efficient and useful to record the call for later review.
Information gathered from the calls is typically used to monitor the performance of the CSR agents to identify any possible training needs. Based on a review and analysis of the conversation, a monitor will make suggestions or recommendations to improve the quality of a customer's experience.
In many instances, call centers receive calls from repeat customer. The repeat customer may require assistance with a new issue or additional assistance with a prior issue. However, a customer may also have had particularly favorable, or particularly poor prior interactions with a customer service representative or transaction experience during a prior call. This favorable or poor interaction may have been a result of behavioral or non-behavioral compatibility with the responding customer service representative, response time, lack of knowledge, inaccessibility to direct contact with a customer service representative or various other analytic attributes or factors.
Thus, there is a need in customer relationship management (“CRM”) for tools useful in improving the quality of future customer interactions with agents by intuitively and automatically routing future calls by the same customer to an appropriate communication destination; whether a self-service destination or a compatible customer service representative. In particular, a need exists for tools that will allow for future call routing based on data collected during prior calls.
The present invention is provided to solve the problems discussed above and other problems, and to provide advantages and aspects not previously provided. A full discussion of the features and advantages of the present invention is deferred to the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.